High Voltage Family

Podcasts

A bit of a rant, and a request for all ages books

Greetings! Just wanted to stop by and see if any of you out there in the land of the internets have any recommendations for comics currently on the stands that can be shared with the fuit of my loins.

My kids, (10,9,7) love comics, athough, it’s not exactly easy these days to pick stuff up easily for them. When I was 10, my folks could easily send me into my LCS and let me grab virtually anything off the shelf, without worrying about the content too much. These days though, especially with the big 2 (DC is much, much more guilty) there is a degree of violence, sexuality, and general darkness in books, because of the mistaken belief that these things make for “mature” storytelling. Heroes can’t be heroic, can’t do the right thing, because it’s the right thing to do. The always has to be either the severing of limbs, murdering, rape, the threat of maiming, death, or rape. There is a mistaken belief that characters that try to do things without violence, or killing are not interesting. That “real life isn’t that black and white,” so our heroes can’t be that simple… But, not only can they, they should be. I wan’t characters that find solutions to problems that aren’t “well, just HAD to kill that guy” or the angsty tooth gritting of the teenagers idea of maturity. I’m not saying there isn’t room for that stuff, that there isn’t room for all kinds of stories, but the vast majority of things out there have all the depth, heroism, and nuance of a Limp Bizkit album. And all ages doesn’t mean you have to make it all light, bright and cartoony, you don’t have to write down to kids, you don’t have to shy away from death or tough questions, but you also don’t have to confuse your repressed, violent fantasies with depth and maturity. So, any good stuff out there for the youngsters? I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks a buttload,

-Kris

P.S. Don’t forget to check out the last episode of the podcast here on the site, or on Stitcher and iTunes.

P.P.S. I posted my first try at playing around with doing something a bit orchestral with Ableton Live 9 check it out! It’s nothing special but was fun to try.